Posted by grep_it 4/16/2025
This is actually super easy. The data is available in BigQuery.[0] It's up to date, too. I tried the following query, and the latest comment was from yesterday.
SELECT
id,
text,
`by` AS username,
FORMAT_TIMESTAMP('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ', TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(time)) AS timestamp
FROM
`bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`
WHERE
type = 'comment'
AND EXTRACT(YEAR FROM TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(time)) = 2025
ORDER BY
time DESC
LIMIT
100
For example:
SELECT * FROM hackernews_history ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 10;
I subscribe to this issue to keep up with updates:
https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/29693#issuec...
And ofc, for those that don't know, the official API https://github.com/HackerNews/API
1. Create a table with styles by authors:
CREATE TABLE hn_styles (name String, vec Array(UInt32)) ENGINE = MergeTree ORDER BY name
INSERT INTO hn_styles WITH 128 AS vec_size,
cityHash64(arrayJoin(tokens(lower(decodeHTMLComponent(extractTextFromHTML(text)))))) % vec_size AS n,
arrayMap((x, i) -> i = n, range(vec_size), range(vec_size)) AS arr
SELECT by, sumForEach(arr) FROM hackernews_history GROUP BY by
SELECT name FROM hn_styles ORDER BY cosineDistance(vec, (SELECT vec FROM hn_styles WHERE name = 'antirez')) LIMIT 25
┌─name────────────┬─────────────────dist─┐
1. │ antirez │ 0 │
2. │ geertj │ 0.009644324175144714 │
3. │ mrighele │ 0.009742538810774581 │
4. │ LukaAl │ 0.009787061201638525 │
5. │ adrianratnapala │ 0.010093164015005152 │
6. │ prmph │ 0.010097599441156513 │
7. │ teilo │ 0.010187607877663263 │
8. │ lukesandberg │ 0.01035981357655602 │
9. │ joshuak │ 0.010421492503861374 │
10. │ sharikous │ 0.01043547391491162 │
11. │ lll-o-lll │ 0.01051205287096002 │
12. │ enriquto │ 0.010534816136353875 │
13. │ rileymat2 │ 0.010591026237771195 │
14. │ afiori │ 0.010655186410089112 │
15. │ 314 │ 0.010768594792569197 │
16. │ superice │ 0.010842615688153812 │
17. │ cm2187 │ 0.01105111720031593 │
18. │ jorgeleo │ 0.011159407590845771 │
19. │ einhverfr │ 0.011296755160620009 │
20. │ goodcanadian │ 0.011316316959489647 │
21. │ harperlee │ 0.011317367800365297 │
22. │ seren │ 0.011390119122640763 │
23. │ abnry │ 0.011394133096140235 │
24. │ PraetorianGourd │ 0.011508457949426343 │
25. │ ufo │ 0.011538721312575051 │
└─────────────────┴──────────────────────┘But I also have seen some accounts that seem to be from other non-native English speakers. They may even have a Latin language as their native one (I just read some of their comments, and, at minimum, some of them seem to also be from the EU). So, I guess, that it is also grouping people by their native language other than English.
So, maybe, it is grouping many accounts by the shared bias of different native-languages. Probably, we make the same type of mistakes while using English.
My guess will be that native Indian or Chinese speakers accounts will also be grouped together, for the same reason. Even more so, as the language is more different to English and the bias probably stronger.
It would be cool that Australians, British, Canadians tried the tool. My guess is that the probability of them finding alt-accounts is higher as the populations is smaller and the writing more distinctive than Americans.
Thanks for sharing the projects. It is really interesting.
Also, do not trust the comments too much. There is an incentive to lie as to not acknowledge alt-accounts if they were created to remain hidden.
That is most likely the case. Case in point: My native language doesn't have articles, so locally they're a common source of mistakes in English.
The project referenced in the post put me next to Brits on the similarity list and indeed I am using an English(UK) dictionary. Meanwhile this iteration aligns me with Americans despite the only change being the vendor (formerly Samsung, now Google).
I guess the Samsung keyboard corrects to proper Bri'ish.
I picked up the language as a child from a collection of people, half of whom weren't native speakers, so I don't speak any specific dialect.
But, if I do the reverse (search using my original account), this one shows up as #2.
The main difference between the accounts is this one has a lot more posts, and my original account was actively posting ~11 years ago.
A <-> B: 80%
A <-> C: 90%
B <-> C: 70%
My comments underindex on "this" - because I have drilled into my communication style never to use pronouns without clear one-word antecedents, meaning I use "this" less frequently that I would otherwise.
They also underindex on "should" - a word I have drilled OUT of my communication style, since it is judgy and triggers a defensive reaction in others when used. (If required, I prefer "ought to")
My comments also underindex on personal pronouns (I, my). Again, my thought on good, interesting writing is that these are to be avoided.
In case anyone cares.
I suppose it's possible the "analyze"-reported proportions are a lot more precise and reliably diagnostic than I imagine. I haven't yet looked in detail at the statistical method.
Also, of course, it would require integration with NLP tooling such as WordNet (or whatever's SOTA there something like a decade and a half on) and a bit of Porter stemming to do part-of-speech tagging. If one 0.7GB dataset is heavyweight where this is running, that could be a nonstarter; stemming is trivial and I recall WordNet being acceptably fast if maybe memory hungry on a decade ago's kinda crappy laptop, but I could see it requiring some expensive materialization just to get datasets to inspect. (How exactly do we define "more common" for eg "smooth?" Versus semantic words, all words, both, or some combination? Do we need another dataset filtered to semantic words? Etc.)
If we're dreaming and I can also have a pony, then it would be neat to see both the current flavor, one focused on semantics as above, and one focused specifically on syntax as this one coincidentally often seems to act like. I would be tempted to offer an implementation, but I'm allergic to Python this decade.
> I would prefer the "analyze" feature focus on content rather than structure words. I forget the specific linguistic terms but to a first approximation, nouns and verbs would be of interest, prepositions and articles not. Let's call the former "semantic" and the latter "syntactic."
> I use "this" less frequently that I would otherwise
Isn't it "less than" as opposed to "less that"?
I prefer to avoid such absolutes and portray causality instead.
For example, in place of “you should not do drugs at work” I prefer “if you take drugs at work you’ll get in trouble”.
I think this mentality is also where the term 'sheeple' comes from.
I too like when others use it, since a very easy and pretty universal retort against "you ought to..." is "No, I don't owe you anything".
And the construct "you owe it to <person> to <verb>" still exists even today but is not nearly as popular as "you should <verb>" precisely because it has to state to whom exactly your owe the duty; with "should" it sounds like an impersonal, quasi-objective statement of fact which suits the manipulative uses much better.
“You should” has a much more generic and less persuasive sentiment. “Why should I?” is a common and easy response which now leaves the suggester having to defend their suggestion to a skeptical audience.
The only place today I see "shall" used correctly where most would say "should" or "will," is in legal documents and signage.
> used to indicate duty or correctness
A duty to others is something you owe them; think, a duty of care and its lack, which is negligence.
You mean, ”I think this should be avoided”? ;)
"Ought to" is essentially a synonym. Anyone that gets upset when you said they should do something but is fine when you say that they ought to do something is truly a moron.
> If someone [test] then he is an idiot.
> Anyone [test] when [test] is truly a moron.
Most people are emotion-first, how the words make them feel is more important than the definitions of them. Being emotion-first doesn't make them stupid.
Otherwise, if someone wants to take the time to dissect meaning from add-on meaningless words like should in a sentence, they should find something better to do with their time. Or just ask instead of being a moron.
You would need more computation to hash, but I bet adding frequency of the top 50 word-pairs and top 20 most common 3-tuples would be a strong signal.
( The nothing the accuracy is already good of course. I am indeed user eterm. I think I've said on this account or that one before that I don't sync passwords, so they are simply different machines that I use. I try not to cross-contribute or double-vote. )
I then realised that "[period] <word>" would likely dominate most common pairs, and that a lot of time could be saved by simply recording the first word of sentences as their own vector set, in addition but separate to the regular word vector.
Whether this would be a stronger or weaker signal per-vector-space than the tail of words in the regular common-words vector I don't know.
When I ran it, it gave me 20 random users, but when I do the analyze, it says my most common words are [they because then that but their the was them had], which is basically just the most common English words.
Probably would be good to exclude those most common words.
I figured it maybe would cluster me with other non-native speakers but it doesn't appear to. Of all the accounts where I could identify a country of origin, all were American.
you, are, have, they, at, an, we, if, do, to
I'm frankly not quite sure how I've avoided them given how common they are.
https://antirez.com/hnstyle?username=pg&threshold=20&action=...
Instead of just HN, now do it with the whole internet, imagine what you'd find. Then imagine that it's not being done already.
Using throwaways whenever possible mitigates a lot of the risk, too.
But if i were a government agency I would be pressing AI providers for data, or fingerprinting the output with punctuation/whitespace or something more subtle.
Tho i guess with open models that people can run on device that’s mitigated a lot.
Taking a look at comments from those users, I think the issue is that the algorithm focuses too much on the topic of discussion rather than style. If you are often in conversations about LLMs or Musk or self driving cars then you will inevitably end up using a lot of similar words as others in the same discussions. There's only so many unique words you can use when talking about a technical topic.
I see in your post that you try to mitigate this by reducing the number of words compared, but I don't think that is enough to do the job.
It focuses on topic a lot, that's true.
I’m not going to try comparing it with normalising apostrophes, but I’d be interested how much of a difference it made. It could easily be just that the sorts of people who choose to write in curly quotes are more likely to choose words carefully and thus end up more similar.
https://antirez.com/hnstyle?username=dang&threshold=20&actio...
> Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. [link to guidelines]
My guess is it was a parody/impersonator account.
You can enable "showdead" in your profile to see [dead] comments ans posts. Most of them are crap, but there are some false positives an errors from time to time.
HN silently black holes any comment made through a VPN, so I would expect a decent amount of false positives.